Transistion to Retirement

We planned a tour of the United States in a recreational vehicle (www.RVIA.org) for years before we retired. Sightseeing in Alaska was the crown jewel of a yearlong travel adventure.

About a year before we retired, we bought a Holiday Rambler (www. holidayrambler.com) fifth wheel and Chevrolet (www.chevrolet.edmunds.net) truck and signed on for an Alaskan caravan tour.

We sold our house. Any furniture and personal items we couldn't sell, give away, or bare to part with went into storage.

In early spring we moved into four hundred fifty square feet of camper. We joked about watching our weight so we'd be able to fit into the shower. We got organized for the big adventure from our base camp at beautiful Apple Island Resort (www.appleislandresort.com) on Lake Champlain in South Hero, Vermont.

We lined up a mail forwarding service (www.usabox.com), and learned to pay bills online. We switched to cell phones and a lap top.

We said lots of goodbyes and promised scores of postcards.

We hitched up and headed south in the fall barely ahead of winter. We spent a relaxing month in the Florida Keys then began a slow excursion around the perimeter of the United States toward the rendezvous point with the (www.hrrvc.org) caravan group the next July.

The rendezvous point was Tubby's Campground in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, mile '0' of the Alaskan Highway. Our first official tour day we drove two hundred seventy-seven miles to Fort Nelson and saw our first two black bears.

We put five thousand miles on our truck traveling in British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska.

Driving across British Columbia, we camped beside the cold, glacial waters of Muncho Lake. The lake is always a beautiful crystal clear blue, the result of copper oxides that leach from the bedrock. Our campground sat on the water's edge. A sudden chill wind kicked up whitecaps. The quiet was deafening.

A day or so later and a short walk from the highway down a forested path lays the Liard River Hot Springs. The hot swirling waters worked wonders on pot hole weary muscles. Even in the coldest winter months the park is open and the springs are hot enough to sooth weary hikers and skiers.

At Skagway we took the White Pass Train through Chilkoot Pass, the boundary range through the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia. Miners climbed the Chilkoot pass in the winter of 1897 -1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush. Jack London arrived in Alaska in 1897 and he and his partners carried supplies over the Chilkoot Pass in the hope of striking it rich. London wrote of his adventures in 1910 in his book Burning Daylight.

An all day bus tour took us deep into Denali National Park. The park has more than six million acres. Clouds hid the mountain. The next day Denali's mists cleared and we saw the magnificent snow covered peak from the highway.

Pan fried Silver Salmon caught fishing on the Kenai Peninsula was delicate and delicious.

We saw glaciers, seals and sea otters on a day long boat outing on Prince William Sound. The air was cold, and the sea was rough, but the scenery was spectacular.

When we started the Alaska Caravan in July the days were nearly twenty-four hours long. By the end of August the light was fading at rate of five minutes a day. We left Prince George, British Columbia to head back to Vermont in early September. It had begun to snow.

Alaska was only seven weeks out of a fifty-two week grand tour of the United States and western Canada. It was a year of discovery and grand adventure.

I'd do it again in a heartbeat.